January 18, 2003

Marjorie Husain speaks to the visiting Bangladeshi painter Jamal Ahmed, who, over the years, has built a steady market for his work in Pakistan

“Do you know,” asked Jamal Ahmed, “most of the Indian restaurants in London are actually Bangladeshi? I discovered that on my last trip to London. There is a ready-made market for my work there which I intend to explore some time in the future. Jamal Ahmed, speaking from the newly relocated Kunj Gallery in Karachi, was describing his travels to various parts of the world.

No stranger to Karachi or to the Kunj Gallery, he has held several successful exhibitions of his work here since the ‘90s, and has built up a steady following. It is hard to locate Jamal, the inveterate traveller, in his work; though he has lived and worked abroad for years, he remains very much a Bengali artist.

Describing his childhood in Dhaka, Jamal talked of the art classes he attended encouraged by his father who had noticed his son spent all his spare time sketching and painting. “My father began to take a serious interest in my art work and enrolled me in children’s art classes which I attended twice a week. I was in class six at that time and I managed to fit my art activities in with my schoolwork. In those days there was only one place for children’s art classes in Dhaka. Now there are several good centres.

“As soon as I finished my formal education I decided to make my life in art and with the blessings of my father, I joined the Dhaka School of Art. There Kibria was the inspiration, and there were several distinguished teachers I received very good guidance from. I graduated with a Bachelor’s in Fine Art, but was very keen to continue my education abroad.”

After a year Jamal Ahmed got a research scholarship in Japan and from there went into a Master’s programme; altogether he spent five years in Japan. “I was determined to further my experience abroad, one reason being the lack of models at that time in Dhaka. There was no life class and I found that very frustrating as I am basically a painter of people. Now the situation is very different.

Japan was a remarkable cultural experience for the young artist fresh from art school.

“I started to learn the language and it took me a year to be able to order a meal, so to speak, and three years before I felt satisfied that I could speak Japanese well. It was not a barrier in art activities as art is a visual language but I did my Master’s dissertation in English. It would have taken me a further three years study of the language to master Japanese to that standard.

“I am very close to Japan now and visit that country every year. My work found a market there and I have an art dealer and a gallery that handle my work in Japan. Paintings are very expensive there so even if I only sell two or three paintings a year, it is a considerable amount.”

Speaking of art and artists in Japan, Jamal is of the opinion that though the Japanese artists have marvellous techniques, they lack the passion of classic western painters: “There must be passion as well as technique. Technique alone cannot keep attracting you to an artist’s work,” he said.

A friendly, smiling, person, Jamal Ahmed compares himself to the pigeons he meets in every country he visits. They are a common factor which the artist has adopted as a motif in his work. He paints groups of pigeons, their feathers seeming to reflect all the colours of an artist’s palette. The walls they shelter against are heavily textured and weathered by time. “They are like me”, he said, “They adjust themselves for a while, appear quite at home in the landscape and then move on.”

Exhibited at the gallery are a collection of forty paintings executed in oil pastels, acrylics and charcoal. They are rather simple compositions in a traditional style of classic Bengali art which seems to strike a chord with collectors in many diverse parts of the world. The striking assemblage includes voluptuous female figures, a fakir whose face appears to fascinate the artist, and landscapes which emits a strong promise of rain to come.

His skies are heavy with unshed drops, the water is dark, and the air appears to move with the weight of rain clouds. There are views of the beaches and fishing boats, families walking across the sands to visit in-laws, hung with parcels of food and sweets. Jamal Ahmed deals with ordinary people, beautiful in a natural, everyday way. Girls wear saris bordered in bright hues, a flower tucked behind the ear, just like they do back home in Bangladesh.

“These days,” the artist informed me, “there are no problems in obtaining models.” Now an associate professor of art at the Dhaka University Fine Arts Department, he conducts a life class at the university for the art students and paints from life in his studio at home. Though his wife is not an artist, she is an art lover and an admirer of his work. Her presence and a young daughter are the reasons that these days Jamal travels less and less.

Painting figures on a large scale, the artist chooses a pale brown paper as his surface, “It is the colour of our skin,” he says, and he merges negative space with mixed media strokes. He would, he says, like to paint an enormous portrait of the old fakir’s, and points out the gaunt bone structure, wild hair and mysterious eyes.

The female forms in a pose of recline appear to create with their bodies the curve of the great Brahamaputra river that winds its way through Bengal. It seems the models are an analogy for the country itself. In the past the artist has exhibited studio scenes, models posing against bright cushions and rugs, splashed with paint motes of dust visible in rays of light. Painted from interesting angles the studio settings were sophisticated cameos of the artist’ lives, another facet of the much travelled painter’s experience.

Jamal has the experience of a two-month residency in America and has visited Europe several times. Yet, his work is firmly grounded in his homeland. He paints what he sees around him, more appreciative perhaps because of the long periods spent away from home and familiar things.